An August assembly...of books

When I was younger and earnest-er, by this time of year I would have already bought all my English uni texts and read through them.

By the time I was back at uni four years ago, picking up a few English honours courses with the idea of turning my on-the-side three year English degree into a slightly-more-functional four year English degree, I was lucky to get through them at all, enmeshed in my job, the Banff Centre's Wired Writing Studio, and a variety of freelance commitments.

The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus of the Virtues of Herbs, Stones and Certain Beasts also A Book of the Marvels of the World. Eds Michael Best & Frank Brightman (Oxford University Press, 1974)

A Medieval Bestiary w/wood engravings by Gillian Tyler by T.J. Elliott (Godine, 1971)

Royal Persian Manuscripts Ed. by Stuart Cary Welch (Thames and Hudson, 1976)

Little Books for Cooks: Mushrooms (Andrews and McMeel, 1997)

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (Simon & Schuster, 1972)

Reversed Forecast by Nicola Barker (Faber & Faber, 1994)

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (Penguin 1995)

Edison & The Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death by Mark Essig (McClelland & Stewart, 2003)

I'm not feeling sentimental for my younger days or even the year before Aa was born, precisely, because I still get heaps and piles of reading done and I have the great good fortune to have my reading subsidized by my job at Aqua Books, but I sort of miss long hot August mornings with nothing to do but pre-read my uni texts...

(Except even then I envied those people who didn't have to get summer jobs.)

Anyways, this long hot nearly-August intro was meant to set up a post about the excellent stack of books I've managed to snag recently at Aqua, the second-hand bookstore where I work...

In terms of my selections, my personal opinion is that you can never have too many woodcuts and translations from the Latin of fanciful creatures, UK-based authors named Barker, and gorgeous gold-embossed Persian illustrations.

It should go without saying that you can never have too many mushrooms.

Also, I would like to note what a relief it was to FINALLY source Edisonia from Aqua. I mean, what would it look like if I got all my research materials elsewhere? Like I'd been cheating on my bookstore, that's what it would have looked like.

Finally, having just been assigned a book for review, I'm looking forward to cross-reading how I SHOULD be reading it.

Fun!

Top Ten

From the Aqua Books tumblelog on the weekend, as composed by bookstore owner Kelly Hughes:

Top Ten Weird People in the store this weekend

#10 The guy who ran in here in a panic begging to know where he could buy pot

#9 The guy I saw in the men’s room using the toilet, then washing his hands, then using the urinal. (I left, so no word on a second hand-washing.)

#8 The woman who asked if this was a library (we get this almost daily)

#7 The two Fringe Festival volunteers who kept panhandling their team leader. (Fringe volunteers get fed, so it has some appeal for urban-camper-y types.)

#6 The guy who took one of Ariel Gordon’s ($7) poetry chapbooks yesterday because he thought it was some kind of a freebie thing, and then brought it back today to show me which of the poems he liked best.

#5 The Fringe Festival volunteer who kept asking Andrea if she knew that one of our bookshelves was on wheels. How ingenious! It must be very handy. Do you move it around a lot? etc., etc.

(More after the turn...)


#4 The drunk who wanted Chicken McNuggets

#3 The bearded giant who eats in the restaurant every week or two, just so he can stare at the servers was in today. He wanted me to tell him if anyone still made tin ceiling tiles. (He was obviously staring at the ceiling as well today.)

#2 Jerry

#1 And best of all, the guy who came in looking for our “spirituality” section. It’s a broad category, I said. What are you looking for? The Dark Arts, he mumbled hoarsely. I showed him where we keep goofy shit, which is above our SciFi section. He then proceeded to pull a whole shelf of Andre Norton down on his head. I guess that would make him a Novice Dark Artist.

And one more...

All photos Assiniboine Forest, Winnipeg, MB. July 22, 2009.

* * *

Since we'd recently had nearly a week of rain and then several sunnier days (i.e. ideal conditions for mushrooms), I eagerly drove myself to Assiniboine Forest this morning, anticipating having my pick of specimens at which to point the camera.

But there weren't many mushrooms. I'm either too late, as evidenced by the clusters reducing to inky compost, or too early... (More after the turn.)

What the forest had in AMPLE quantity, unfortunately, was mosquitoes.

After having liberally sprayed myself with poison and even worn jeans in an attempt to foil the buggies, they then attempted my knuckles. After I sprayed my knuckles, they attempted the cracks between my fingers, the insides of my ears, and anywhere I was sweaty.

Which, after marching through the long grass waving my poison-slick arms, was most everywhere.

Sigh...

a hundred lashes

Stegner house: the reading

July 13, the day of my end-of-term reading at the Stegner House, was the second day of storms in Eastend.

It even stormed a few hours before the reading...which is the kind of weather that scares off audience members, especially those invited to a backyard reading/potluck.

By the time the reading was slated to begin, however, the back yard was sunny enough for me to attempt a tanktop and windy enough to keep off the bugs.

And I'm not sure what it is about humble potlucks, but the last few I've attended have been magnificent.

This one included deer sausage, a 'chinese' salad (cabbage and nuts and mr. noodle bits with soy), a pasta salad, a mushroom and broccoli quiche, a small ham, and a fruit platter.

My contribution was a broccoli and grape salad and Gerry Hill's mother's recipe butter tarts, defrosted and then baked in the half-hour before everyone arrived.

(More after the turn...)

But the capper was the contribution of Don Scott, a Californian writer with Canadian relatives who's writing a biography of a colleague of Wallace Stegner's (whose name I can't remember, unfortunately...).

Having stayed at the house twice before, he was visiting in the area in his camper when he learned that the house had suddenly come free for the last two weeks in July due to a cancellation.

So Don - primed to move in the next day - was my first guest, appearing at the door with a loaf of sourdough bread under one arm, a bottle of red wine under the other, and a big helping of fancy salami swinging from a bag on his forearm.

(As you might expect in a small town with limited grocery options, the fresh crusty bread and spicy cured meat were gobbled up.)

A dozen or so other people joined us in the back yard, some I'd met in the previous three weeks in Eastend and some I hadn't. And we ate and chatted and, as the wind picked up, retreated inside for coffee, tea and poetry.

I read the first five sections from Guidelines, an Edison poem I'd gotten down while at the house, and then, after a question and answer period that touched on process and subject matter, a few sections from my poem Substitutions in the Rutting Season anthology.

And then we chirped at each other, tickled to be in each other's company.

It reminded me why I like giving readings and added a bit of pomp and circumstance to the end of my term at the Wallace Stegner House, punctuating my three weeks there but also providing a nice interlude between the day of housecleaning that preceded it and the full day of driving that followed it.

Thanks to Don for the wine, the conversation, and also these pictures. Thanks to M for minding Aa, who does NOT enjoy readings or at least readings that aren't exclusively for her. Thanks to Ethel for setting up the reading and every other Stegner-related detail.

A further thanks to all the writers and artists who stopped in at the house while I was there. It made me feel as though I was writing and reading and thinking alongside a community of artists, which is an awfully homey feeling..and awfully necessary, when you've transplanted yourself into a place not-your-home.

I'm pleased to say that I've only got one more copy of Rutting Season to my name and a handful of Guidelines in addition to the four copies still for sale at Aqua Books.

The next few months will include mini-tours of both books. I'm going to be in Montreal August 11-14 and will try to work up a reading from Rutting Season, given that the publisher is based in Montreal.

Later in the fall, I'm hoping to get to Edmonton again, this time to read from Guidelines. Since I'll be going all that way, I'm also going to try to set up readings in Regina and maybe Saskatoon...but we'll see.

Experientially Speaking

Hey all,

I'm sitting here, having freshly showered and changed into my reading frock, having succumbed to the interweb's fiendish lure.

I should be putting the butter tarts Gerry Hill left in the Wallace Stegner freezer in the oven and pulling out the broccoli & grape salad I made earlier and testing the seasoning - all in service of tonight's end-of-term reading - but I wanted to share something first.

One of the pleasures of giving into the interweb's wiles is that sometimes lovely things like the summer issue of the Sage Hill Writing Experience's alumni newsletter Experientially Speaking arrive.

I'm profiled in this latest issue, which is sort of fun, and involved answering a series of questions via email a month or so ago and trying not to sound harried/boastful/stupid.

For those of you not SH alumni, I thought I'd post the text here...


(Also: Yay! Fun!)


* * *


My favourite place to write is:

My dining room table. My upstairs office. The couch. The passenger seat of the
car.

—————————————————————————————

I can’t write without:

Tea, hot and sweet and as black as my heart.

——————————————————————————————-

The writer I admire most is:

Robert Kroetsch. He’s smart and funny and dirty and I like how he strings both
his poetry and his fiction together.

—————————————————————————————

That last book I read was:

Girls Fall Down (Coach House) by Maggie Helwig. I’ve also got a two-
volume 1929 biography of Thomas Edison that I’m referring to con-
stantly these days, but that’s because I’m working on a cycle of poems
about Edison and his eldest daughter Dot.

—————————————————————————————

The last thing I wrote was:

A poem called ‘How to Write a Poem' from an ever-growing series
based on articles sourced from the wikiHow widget.

—————————————————————————————

The thing I remember most about Sage Hill is:

My mentor Daphne Marlatt in the Poetry Colloquium last summer. I’d
probably be remiss if I didn’t thank her, as she gave the two chapbook
manuscripts I wound up publishing this spring a final thorough shake.

And, of course, the galloping deer that almost bowled me over one
morning.

Stegner house: fungi

(More photos after the turn...)

Stegner house: fauna

Stegner house: flora

(More photos after the turn...)



Three views from Chimney Coulee, July 9, 2009. (Dried sap hanging from a pine tree, mid-coulee, a flower from the coulee floor, and a prickly pear bloom from its shortgrass lip...)

Stegner house: and one more

When I arrived at the Stegner House and a half weeks ago, there was a bouquet of pink and white peonies on the dining room table.

Along with red geraniums, yellow marigolds & pink petunias, peonies are signature Winnipeg flowers.

Which is to say that they're hardy and simultaneously a little dowdy AND gaudy...

But, along with the light streaming in the windows, the peonies helped to welcome me to the Stegner House.

After two days of driving, I appreciated the gesture they represented and also the reminder of home...

So I helped them to last as long as possible, trimming the stems a little each day & changing the water. (More after the turn.)

And when the flowers drooped, I moved the still-closed buds to a smaller vase and watched them open over several days.

This week, the peonies beside the house started to bloom. They're on the pine-sheltered side and so are a couple of weeks behind the bushes at the Stegner House administrator's house down the road, even though one's probably a cutting from the other.

I don't think I'll cut any blooms for the house. I want them to lean over the skulls laid beside them on the dirt. I want them to lean over the pinecones and cool needles keeping the weeds down.

I want the world to be both dowdy AND gaudy just a bit longer.

Stegner house: in the trees

Being the only mushroom I've found in three weeks on the shortgrass prairie. Not that I've done much walking the past week, having buried myself in my notebook & only surfacing to rifle through the three Edison biographies I brought with for something juicy.

And, what's worse, M found it first, on a elm at the end of our block.



This one is from the pine tree in the Stegner House yard, where someone trimmed away a branch at just the right height to poke someone in the eye.

Stegner house: end-of-term reading

The Wallace Stegner House presents: a reading with Ariel Gordon

When: Monday, June 13
Time: 6:00 pm
Where: Wallace Stegner House, Eastend, SK.

What: An end-of-term reading + potluck in the backyard of the Wallace Stegner House.

* * *

I haven't decided if I'm going to read from Guidelines or from material written while I was here, which seems foolhardy but also apropos...(more after the turn)

Speaking of which, the clutch of Edison poems I wrote as a part of this year's May Day Poetry Project have expanded while I've been here, from 12 or 13 pages to 34 pages as of last week.

Also, my thinking shifted on the project, which is to say that Edison has hijacked the entire manuscript.

I'm still at the first draft section for much of this, so pages and pages (i.e. poems and poems) will most likely drift out of the manuscript or change radically...but the poems are coming and there is a bit of a fretwork to support them now, so I feel confident in my first draft insecurity.

If that makes any sense...

* * *

Beautiful goddamn storm out the window. Makes me want to head outside so I can watch the clouds move across the hills but it also makes me want to hole up on the front porch with a the purplest of purple biographies and prime myself for tomorrow's work.

Leaping in. Leaping...

* * *

In other news, I had the great good fortune to have a houseful of artists at several points this week...

The first instance was because the house had been scheduled for some maintenance, mostly to the roof and upstairs windows. Luckily, the person doing the repair was a Saskatoon-based fine furniture maker/photographer, Zach Hauser, who'd been coerced to the work on this heritage house. He in turn coerced his wife, the painter Iris Hauser, to come with.

I must say, if I had to have anyone banging on the roof/walls/windows whilst here, I'm glad it was them. I even foisted one of my Guidelines chapbooks on them.

One day, when I'd taken a break for lunch and similarly coerced Zach/Iris to take a break with iced chai, a poet rapped at our door.

It was Bruce Rice, a Regina-based poet who was part of a gaggle of writers & painters who'd taken up residence at a ranch-house up the hill. This shifting pan-Prairie-based group spend five days writing/painting every year here in Eastend and have grand communal dinners on their windy stretch of hill.

Bruce invited me to dinner, so, after a hot day of childminding, I drove myself up the hill, a bottle of wine in the passenger seat. And let myself be tangled up in the wind and in the conversation (and shared the wine, thankfully)...

I walked away, five or six hours later with Rice's The Illustrated Statue of Liberty, Jerry Rush's The Bones of their Occasion, a print of snowy early-June Eastend (!) by Regina-based sculptor Dennis Evans, and a head-ful of good art chat.

And minus four Guidelines chapbooks. And minus a reading in the round from said chapbook...

* * *

So if any of youse SK-based folk were wiffle-waffling about making the trek to Eastend for my reading, I'll tell you now: I'm making pasta salad.

(With fresh tarragon & basil, peas & cherry tomatoes, fig-scented balsamic & garlic puree...)

Edisonia: lures, or, having deciding birds could fly because they ate worms, punishment.

How she used to look when she’d come out
onto the big stoop
of the house and call Alva!

That particular morning. The sound of switch
on flesh, Aedison’s bitter cries drift
down, licks of soft ash
from second-story banishment.

(The girl, having drank storm/clouds
of mashed-up worms & water, her thin arms
at her side, sweating,
emptying
her belly on Aedison’s boots.)

The adamant undone gleam
of dark eyes, cheeks’ flush as she leans
into the morning’s advancing light
& quietly asks if I want
my lunch.

(Pie.)

(Not having to shine
the boots.)